Thought Leadership: Love Your Work Like You Love Your Sports Team

Positioning yourself (or a prominent member of your team) as an industry expert or thought leader is a vital component of any content marketing strategy. This is because content delivered by an individual within your organization has the potential to add personality to your brand.

Remember: People don’t buy from faceless corporations; they buy from people they like. This is why huge brands spend millions of dollars seeking endorsements from celebrities and other well-known spokespeople.

So what are the first steps you need to take when building your reputation as an expert?

First and foremost, you need to demonstrate that you have a real passion for your business. If you cannot get excited about your business, how are you going drive your prospects’ interest? This needs to go beyond the “I love my job” kind of passion. You need to love your work like some people love their sports team.

Think about it. You must know people who are so passionate about their sports team, they know the name of every player, have a photographic memory of every game won (even before they were born) and can deliver a rousing speech about why their team is so important to them. Perhaps you are one of these people.

This is the kind of passion you need to generate for your business if you are to successfully position yourself as a high-profile expert. In the marketing scenario, your teammates are your colleagues, products or services, and customers, and your winning games are best remembered as your customers’ victories (people like to learn how you help other businesses – not just your own bottom line).

When you develop a passion, everything becomes a little easier.

When you have a passion about your business, writing regular blogs posts, building engaging email campaigns, delivering relevant social media campaigns or hosting inspirational speaking engagements becomes so much easier.

Outside of business, my passion is cycling (although I have to admit that my own personal efforts are more lifestyle than sportive). So when I can take the opportunity to combine my job as a marketing strategist with a little analogy about cycling, I’m a very happy man.

On Wednesday, November 27, 2013, at 2pm UK time/9am Eastern, I’ll be presenting a free webinar with my colleagues at Vocus UK discussing how your business can build an agile and effective content marketing strategy based on my theory that content marketing is very much like a bicycle wheel (low cost, lightweight, efficient, constantly turning).